Chapter 3: Louise - The Golden Hours

Louise, a couple of years older than her cousins Polly and Clary, was already there. Terence, her boss at the theatrical agency where she worked in London, had closed the office for two weeks over Christmas and New Year, claiming it was because everybody else would be away so there’d be no work to do, but actually because he wanted to go to Tangiers. Louise knew this, as she knew everything, because although she had been Terence’s client first, and then his sort-of secretary, before starting to take on her own clients, she still made his travel arrangements. Not that she was complaining. The snow in London lay in small drifts against lamp posts and abandoned cars, treacherous and undoubtedly sordid at heart. Two weeks off was fine by her, and she had decided to head straight down to Norfolk. Not because her dear flatmate Stella Rose was away; not because the twinkly lights of London were just rather lonely when there was nobody in the flat; not because nobody was asking her out to dinner, and everybody at the Christmas parties was drunk and lecherous. Not even because Joseph Waring had also taken two weeks off and would soon be on his way to Paris with his wife and children to spend Christmas at the Georges Cinq. No, it was because she loved her family. She would genuinely be happier sitting by Polly’s fire talking about the children, or doing a little light forestry with her cousin Simon, or just helping, in that rather random way that becomes possible with a group of women who have known each other for ever.

Now, she was in the kitchen, sitting on the edge of the old pine table, long legs in jeans stretched out, watching as Eliza (known as Za) and Janie, Polly and Gerald’s twins, took charge – as they did of most things, she’d noticed – of the ceremony of the insertion of the silver charms into the Christmas pudding. It wasn’t just that they were the oldest and the bossiest, nor that it was their house, nor even that they were identical. There was a sheer force of doubleness about them which made them somehow alarming. Neville, Clary’s brother, had once said, ‘They’re only twins to show off’, and he did have a point. They never seemed to disagree. They never even had to discuss anything – at least, not in front of other people. There seemed little point in any child at Fakenham trying to do anything without their approval. Meanwhile their younger brother Spencer, known as Pen, was trying to pinch the palette knife for use as a sword; Buttercup was trying to steal the little silver donkey (‘But it’s my tiny pet!’ she cried disconsolately as Za repossessed it), and the middle child, Andrew, was already telling the little ones off, currying favour, leaping in before any diktat from his big sisters.

The charms lived all year in a small teapot on a high shelf, from which it had been brought down in preparation. Janie and Za accepted the teapot from Mr Tonbridge, and tipped the charms out on the clean dishcloth provided. Each tiny silver shape denoted what you would be or get during the upcoming year: the button for a bachelor; the horseshoe for luck; the little donkey for being an ass; the thimble for an old maid; the bell for a wedding; the wishbone for a wish; the little anchor, which must have been for something but nobody knew what. Everybody hoped that when the slabs of pudding came round, they would get the wishbone. Bertie, Louise thought, pines for the button.

Lengthy negotiations took place on Christmas Eve as to when stockings were to be opened, with whom and on whose bed. Rank had been pulled, and feelings hurt. Frequent severe and urgent looks were beamed by parents to older children apropos not letting the cat out of the bag re Father Christmas, his existence or lack thereof, in the presence of smaller children. The grown-ups referred to the older children as The Tribe of ’49. It included Polly and Gerald’s twins, Clary and Archie’s dashing young Bertie, and Rupert and Zoë’s animal-mad Georgie. They had all been born in a rush ‘just when we’d settled down a bit after the war’, was Polly’s theory. Plus Hugh and Jemima’s Laura, a year younger, and Harriet, of course, Clary and Archie’s first child, who was a year older, born in 1948. Six within two years! But Harriet is different, Louise thought. She always has been. An observer where all the others are hurtlers. Happier alone in a huge jigsaw than in the hurly-burly of a family game of Monopoly.

Louise loved watching them, listening in on their childhood politics from the safety of a sofa, cigarette in one hand, sherry in the other, Belka or Strelka at her side. A cocktail would have been nice, or even a gin, but there we are. Country life.

This tangled gang of cousins, offspring of first cousins and second marriages, overlapping generations, had various ways of organising itself. The methods shifted, sometimes like sandbanks under the wind, sometimes like plate tectonics: by age, by sex, by jealousy, by familiarity, by recent insult, by animal affection, by perceived rank, by town versus country, by whose house they were in. Not so much a Venn diagram as a kaleidoscope, she mused, as it shook, and settled again. Were we like that? Of course we were . . . Size, she knew, though imperfect, was always a fallback classification, certainly for the adults but also for the young people themselves. Age was status. Or at least part of it. Za, Janie, Laura and Harriet would always be the Big Girls – but Harriet, though the oldest, never came at the top of the list. That was always the twins. Pen and Buttercup would always be the Little Ones. No matter how old she became, unless someone had another child, Buttercup would be the baby for ever. Andrew, Bertie and Georgie would always be the Boys, though no three boys could be more unalike, other than in their propensity to fight, compete and disagree. Georgie, hair on end, always with a vole or a bag of earwigs or slow worms or something in his pocket, had no idea why nobody wanted to hold them and be told absolutely everything about them. Hilarious Bertie, to be quite frank, was as camp as a row of tents, a sort of thirteen-year-old one-man screwball comedy, and utterly beautiful. And Andrew, oh God, well, what could you say? The fairy godmothers seemed to have given all the good stuff to Bertie, basically. Was there ever a child more pompous than Andrew? And then there were Tom and Henry, the Big Boys. Why weren’t they higher? Louise wondered. It wasn’t that they didn’t count, but they were later arrivals, being Jemima’s from a previous marriage when nobody even knew them. So they arrived out of context, already older and further away, always on their way somewhere to further their education: boarding school, university, dizzyingly, dazzlingly out of view.

The little ones were brought down, Buttercup fresh from her snowdrift, both of them indescribably sweet in their tiny pyjamas, to be said goodnight to. ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!’ they said. ‘Aunt Louise! Everybody! Look out the windows!’ The moon had risen and the snow was still falling, magical, fragile, flying, settling, staying, everlasting, indomitable snow.

‘It’s really settling,’ announced Rupert. ‘Do you understand what that means?’

The immediate members of his family developed an air of mystery and excitement.

‘We can have the Boxing Day Snowman Competition!’ Georgie shouted, and began to dance about in the manner which Gerald’s old Nanny used to describe as ‘Like a little savage, bless him’.

‘We must get out the Book of Feats,’ said Gerald, ‘and see what we can record.’ This was a large and ancient leather-bound album in which Gerald, his ancestors, and now his children, plus guests, wrote up their notable achievements: swimming across the lake on New Year’s Day, walking the ten miles to Holkham Beach avoiding the road, sailing singlehanded round Scolt Head Island and not running aground, smoking venison in a fire pit, and on one occasion – which was never repeated due to complaints from those who had to do the laundry, despite the fact that everybody involved was practically naked – total full-body immersion in the mud at Morston. Andrew was keen to contribute to the Book of Feats. The snowman competitions offered excellent opportunity.

Father Christmas was, in fact, Louise, because she was the one person whose bedroom was safe from rampaging youngsters. (Simon would help with distribution on the night; for a big man he was light on his feet, and he had the utmost respect for the sanctity of both myth and tradition.) It seemed a rather domestic duty for someone as glamorous as Louise, and she knew Polly and Clary worried every year that it might be unkind to make her do it, as she had no child there, and every year she had to re-persuade them that on the contrary, she liked it. A little brainless organisation was a relaxation. A little extravagance in Hamleys or Pollock’s or Galt’s with their pretty wooden things was not beyond her capabilities. Nor indeed her pocket. Her own pocket! She was proud of that.

It was getting dark, and she had closed the shutters against the frosty dusk when a knock came on the bedroom door and Clary scuttled in bringing the stocking presents she had for Harriet, Bertie and Buttercup.

‘I almost didn’t make it,’ she said, a little breathless. ‘That pest Andrew spotted me on the back stairs and wanted to know where I was going.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘Do you know, I can’t remember?’ Clary said, dropping her haphazard armful on the bed. ‘How are you?’

‘Wonderful,’ said Louise, dodging a distinct threat of incoming sympathy. Clary was always being mildly annoyingly nice about slightly difficult things that Louise lived with as perfectly normal – the married boyfriend, and so forth. Plus, Louise knew perfectly well that everything, to Clary, was material for writing. ‘Look, I’ve made a pile for each of them. It’s girls on the left and the boys at the end.’ She gestured vaguely.

Clary started pulling packages out of her pile. ‘I really don’t see why stocking presents need to be wrapped,’ she said. ‘And, I should have saved wrapping them up till now. What on earth is this?’ she said, waving something long and thin.

‘Is it alive?’ said Louise, and they both grinned. The joke had originated one Christmas when Gerald had given Georgie a gift which Georgie had forgotten behind a sofa because it clearly wasn’t a bicycle, and Gerald had forgotten to nudge him about. Georgie didn’t even unwrap it till after supper, when inside the beribboned box he discovered a small ostentation of rather subdued baby peacocks. ‘Peachicks!’ he had corrected everyone, though that was held to be a foolish term, far too easily confused with chick peas. After that, the organic status of any family gift had to be ascertained promptly. The peachicks were fine, and now glorious in their adulthood still stalked the grounds of Fakenham Hall, making the strange howls that reminded Louise of tremendously grand people playing croquet – ‘Aeiou . . . aeiou!’ ‘But they wouldn’t have been if I’d left them till breakfast,’ Georgie had observed, contrite with potential regret. He’d been quite sad that he hadn’t been allowed to bring them back to London. They could have lived in the back garden at Mortlake, and swum in the river.

‘It’d better not be alive,’ said Clary. ‘A pen? A very small umbrella?’

‘These ones in the paper with robins on are Polly’s contribution,’ said Louise, ‘and everybody gets a chocolate ladybird.’ She had bought them, red and shiny in their foil wrappers with their flat black paper legs, at Maison Sagne in Marylebone High Street, along with a large box of Florentines and four bottles of decent champagne. Gerald was generous but his tastes were not sophisticated.

‘Very nice,’ said Clary. ‘How on earth can you afford it?’

‘Business has been good this year,’ Louise responded. ‘I signed up a star and got a bonus. I’ll tell you all about it but apply your mind, please: a ladybird, a stripy paper party blower, the tangerine for the toe and the nuts and raisins in the heel, which I’ve already wrapped in the finest silver foil. Then bath cubes for the girls, and for the boys little metal tape measures. Look, they snap back into their tins!’

‘Like very quick snails,’ said Clary, trying one out. ‘Ouch! Do we need to wrap these?’

‘God, probably. Here.’ Louise chucked her the tissue paper from the shopping bag.

There were eleven children this year.

‘Are you sure?’ said Clary.

‘Za, Janie, Andrew, Pen. Laura. Bertie, Buttercup and Harriet.’

‘That’s only eight.’

‘Georgie. And Tom and Henry.’

‘Oh, are they coming? And are they children?’

‘I don’t suppose they are. They’ll probably want bottles of whisky, and cigars.’

‘Actually, I think Georgie and Bertie would be happy with those too,’ said Clary. ‘Zoë told Juliet that reaching twenty-five means you don’t get a stocking any more, and apparently she nearly wept. She’s been reading a novel where someone’s lover has a stocking made up for her at Liberty and she gets a bottle of Calèche and emerald earrings. And an orchid. And a dashing white charger. Is she here?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Louise said. ‘But do you know, one of the marvellous things I’ve learned lately is that if I want something, I can get it for myself. In fact, I have to, to be sure it’s the right thing at the right moment. So much time I’ve wasted waiting and wondering about why men won’t give me what I need.’

She felt Clary’s look: poor Louise, it’s taken you so long to realise. Poor Louise, no child to spoil. Poor Louise, no husband to spoil her when she so likes to be spoiled. They were both quite aware that it broke all the rules: Louise, the glamorous one, was unmarried; Clary, the clever one, had a lovely husband and three children. And Polly, the pretty domestic one, had everything.

‘How’s Joseph?’ Clary said. Louise could see in her ever-readable face that she was working out whether it was safe to mention him. As they were alone.

‘Off to Paris with the Mrs,’ Louise said, too easily. Clary maintained an entirely bland expression, clearly not daring to respond for fear of having her head bitten off. Clary’s inability to conceal her thoughts or opinions was one of the many lovable things about her. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Louise said. ‘I’m used to it! It’s my bloody role, isn’t it. It’s in the terms and conditions of my position!’

‘Darling,’ said Clary, rather helplessly.

‘But you know what?’ Louise said. ‘Guess what he said to me. You’ll love this.’ Her voice had a strident gaiety that she didn’t feel. Clary would see right through it.

‘What?’ said Clary.

‘He said, not in so many words, but he suggested it would be a good idea for me to, well, give up my job. Because, he said, as things are – now let me get the words right . . . All right, he didn’t use the actual word but the upshot was that it was demeaning to him for me to work.’

Clary thought about that for a moment.

‘But . . .’ she said.

‘But indeed!’ said Louise. ‘As if I was his wife and it was 1938. I was so surprised. He’s always been perfectly all right about it, not annoying or even concerned. I mean, he was proud of it when I was modelling. I suppose that reflected well on him. But now that I’m doing actual work that’s interesting and I get to make decisions and have actual thoughts, he’s sort of, I don’t know, embarrassed. His wife has never worked, obviously, but seriously . . . I always have, apart from – well, since the divorce I always have if I could. So he was kind of inviting me to become dependent on him . . .’

‘While not taking responsibility for you,’ continued Clary.

‘Exactly. And I wouldn’t want him to anyway. I never wanted that.’

‘He tried to rent you a flat, didn’t he.’

‘He did, bless him. I mean – he meant well. But I just couldn’t.’

‘Why not, actually?’ asked Clary, and Louise smiled. Even as a child Clary had been unembarrassedly curious, taking notes left, right and centre about human behaviour, wanting to know about things that Louise, that bit older, would know more about.

‘Self-respect?’ she said. ‘Perhaps something to do with Dad and Diana. Oh God, it all just makes me –’ Suddenly she found she didn’t want to talk to Clary about it after all. Every way she looked at it, it came out wrong.

‘Sometimes I think even the nicest men have no idea of what it is to be a woman,’ Clary said, deliberately misunderstanding. She was good at back-pedalling. She never wanted anybody to be discomfited by her continuous research. They might stop telling her things, or even stop revealing them by accident. She knew when to stop with Louise. She had learned it over the years.

‘Well,’ said Louise, reasonably. ‘How could they?’

‘They could listen to us!’ cried Clary.

‘Is the nicest man in the world not listening to you?’ asked Louise.

‘Oh, it’s not that,’ Clary said. ‘I’m not telling him. I mean, I will, just not yet.’

‘Tell him what?’

‘I can’t tell you,’ said Clary. ‘Not till I’ve told him. You don’t mind, do you?’

Louise did not mind. Her sense of honour differed from Clary’s but she was in favour of honour and understood that it had variations.

‘Bags I’m second to know,’ she said now.

‘You and Poll, joint second,’ said Clary. ‘And anyway, I’m glad you’re earning enough to buy champagne and Florentines.’

‘It’s so liberating!’ Louise said loudly, diving into another of Clary’s bags and pulling out a box of handkerchiefs. Clary had brought a roll of papery red tape for tying things up: narrow and unsatisfactory, given to splitting lengthways like straw if you tried to bite through it horizontally. Louise had scissors: little gold ones in the shape of a bird.

‘Do you think Zoë dyes her hair?’ Clary said, to change the subject.

‘Why do you ask?’ replied Louise cautiously, having recently considered a slight artificial goldening of her sleek but fading blonde mane, and decided against as the risk of a peroxide effect was simply too great.

‘Suspiciously un-grey,’ said Clary. ‘And chic. Plus, she’s the type, don’t you think? All those silk knickers.’

Louise considered her own silk knickers, and type. Does Clary not have any silk knickers? Probably not. As girls the three of them had always known everything about one another, and yet, as adult women, that had somehow faded away. I ought to know about her knickers, she thought, suddenly and strongly.

‘You’re the one who lives with her,’ she said. ‘You should have a poke around.’

Clary gave a hollow laugh, which Louise recognised. The hollow laugh had become a staple in any conversation about Clary’s domestic life.

Louise was bemused by Clary and Archie, Zoë and Rupert all living together in the little art school. The men – both noticeably older than their wives, though none of them seemed to notice – had set up in a staggeringly lovely and impractical house on the Thames at Mortlake: Bank House, a Georgian beauty with creaky floorboards warped by the river air, and ceilings that dappled with watery sunlight at high tide. What was going on there? Was it an excuse for Rupert and Archie to revert to being artists in their later years? It was certainly an interesting ménage. Louise lived in a state of consistent curiosity about it and permanent expectation of its imminent collapse. How could Clary live with her husband, her father, her three children, her little half-brother, the beautiful Nanny (she really did look like Elizabeth Taylor) and her stepmother? And Georgie’s zoo? And get her plays written? Louise had writer clients at the agency who claimed not to be able to lift a finger unless she found them a suite at the Ritz, or rooms in a small palace in Palermo.

‘How is the commune?’ she said.

‘Borderline communist,’ said Clary. ‘My desk is back in the bedroom, and I’ve basically had to build barricades round it. You know the old Chinese screen? With the torn embroidery? That, laden with dressing gowns. It looks like backstage at the Moulin Rouge. I almost had a standup fight with Archie, who seems to think that only painters deserve nice views of the river. Zoë shuts herself in the bathroom to get away from the students.’

Louise laughed. She was squinting at the neatly folded cotton squares under their cellophane. ‘You can almost smell the disappointment,’ she said. ‘Handkerchiefs! Every child’s dream.’

‘Got to be done,’ said Clary brutally. ‘Christmas is nothing if not a lesson in disappointment.’

Later, in bed, Louise couldn’t but mull. It had been four years since the final Christmas at Home Place, when she had wept uncontrollably on her Aunt Rachel, on the back stairs, determined to leave Joseph – dear Rachel, who had lost her Sid only the year before. Well, that had been a heightened period, for everybody. Exhausting. The collapse of the family business, the Duchy’s death. And they had all taken things so much for granted, for so long, that they’d had no idea what life would be like now. We’d never experienced a life where we had to be responsible for ourselves. Not one of us. Except perhaps Archie, and Jemima, who after all were not born Cazalets. It had taken a while, she thought, not for the first time, for people to get their heads around what this meant in reality, for each of them. And then, what it meant for each other.

She, Louise, had taken the crisis as a spur to destroy the only other thing she had holding her life together: her long, delightful and impossible relationship with Joseph Waring. It was not that she didn’t love Joseph, or that he was no good. He was attractive, intelligent, kind, rich, generous. More to the point, she knew him and he knew her. They loved each other – a mutual love, grown and settled over years; a real love, she thought, with flaws and forgiveness, past and future. But he was married, and not to her. And she knew – and had hidden for years, from herself, the fact that she knew – that this was a false basis. The love was built on lies – not just the ones he told his wife every day, but the ones she told herself – that this was enough, that this was what she wanted, that things were all right. Beneath those lies lay the knowledge that she had to end it. There was something about getting older, wanting an actual job, no longer being willing to live hand-to-mouth on canapés from cocktail parties and extra-marital dinners at L’Etoile. A woman in her thirties should know what she’s doing.

She had tried. She had honestly thought she could do it, in a ‘let everything burn!’ kind of way. If there has to be this change then let it be all change. Tabula rasa.

Four whole years ago, after having made the scene on Rachel, she had written a letter on the train home. It had come so easily: no blots, no tears, no failed attempts or fair copies. Just a hard and necessary determination, and a few phrases that rose brief, true and eloquent enough. She had been so determined, then, to end this thing, of which she was not proud, and which she knew could go nowhere.

And then, when she’d walked up the stairs and into the cold flat, there had been a package on the kitchen table. She’d eyed it, as she dropped her valise and peeled her coat off. It was not a brown-paper package come through the post, but a sparkly-papered Christmas package, with a ribbon. There was something familiar about the paper: white, with green bells and gold stars. Stella’s, she’d thought. Sweet of her, as she went to run a bath. Only when she was in the bath, up to her neck in luxurious pine-smelling foam, enough hot water to properly immerse because there was nobody else in the building today, did she remember that Stella and she had agreed not to give each other presents, and indeed had already had a rather swanky tea together instead, in Piccadilly.

Still wrapped in her towel, she’d opened the present: a promising box (dark blue leather, old and worn), and within it a necklace of large glowing green stones on a bed of foxed cream satin. Georgian paste. Her favourite thing. Her favourite colour. From Cameo Corner, her favourite jewellery shop. The note said: Happy New Year, my darling. It will be. J. It was a gift so beautiful, so touching, so her. She’d put them on, wiping the steamed-up bathroom mirror to admire them on her clean pearly skin. When the doorbell went, she’d leaned out the window. When he came up, seeing her outfit, he’d laughed with joy.

Was I really that easily swayed? One pretty necklace?

Well, of course there was much more to it than that. The look on his face. Her own delight in seeing him. His promise of more time. Talk of a week away together in the spring. The fun of it, his warm body, how well he knew her, how much he loved her, how glorious they were together in bed.

Yes, she’d chickened out. She could see nothing after the end, except loneliness. A former mistress, a failed mother, a failed marriage, a bolter, an older woman, alone.